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Ubuntu to push latest Firefox to Hardy, Jaunty and Karmic

According to a posting on the Ubuntu developers mailing list, Ubuntu developers are planning to push the next release of Firefox, 3.6.4, to the current Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx 10.04, and to older versions such as Hardy (8.04LTS), Jaunty (9.04) and Karmic Koala (9.10). These older versions currently have Firefox 3.0 and xulrunner 1.9 both of which are no longer supported by Mozilla.

The move ends a long standing practice of back-porting security fixes to previous Firefox versions running on older versions of Ubuntu. The change is being made in anticipation of a move from Mozilla to accelerate their update rate for Firefox to 4-6 weeks for minor security/stability releases and 4-6 months for major version updates. The developers have decided that the back-porting process was more risky in terms of creating regressions than updating to the latest Firefox release. There will not be an update for those running Intrepid Ibex (8.10) which is now beyond its 18 month support window.

A full explanation of the rationale behind the decision is available on the developer Wiki which also covers changes to xulrunner and applications that make use of xulrunner. The developers are also looking for users of Hardy (8.04LTS) to help test these changes.